Your Management Sucks: Why You Have to Declare War on Yourself . . . and Your Business by Mark Stevens

Publisher: Crown Business (May 9, 2006)  ISBN-10: 1400054931  ISBN-13: 978-1400054930

Like a mirror, Your Management Sucks reveals important truths that you may deal with . . . or choose to ignore or put on the back burner.

Everyone manages someone or something . . . your own life and career, an administrative assistant, hundreds or thousands of people. How well or poorly you manage has a profound impact on your personal success.

Mark Stevens makes the compelling point that at any given time everyone’s management sucks. It can, however, be improved and rethought so you can move away from patterns and habits that you can easily fall victim to.

Start by declaring constructive war on yourself. Look in the mirror and identify those invisible traps and barriers. Then leave the land of business-as-usual with the seven-point plan Stevens has used to build both his own extraordinary career and his marketing and strategy consulting firm. You’ll soon find that you’re in the fast lane, easily outpacing your passive peers who rarely, if ever, challenge the how and why of what they do.

Mark Stevens—a street-smart kid from Queens, New York, who has gone on to phenomenal success—not only gives advice to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups, he takes his own. Concerned that his business, MSCO, would continue its steady but limited growth, he announced one morning during breakfast with his wife, “Honey, I’m going to fire everyone.” That intention, while actually carried out over a lengthy period of time, was based on one simple insight—that his team of good people wouldn’t be able to put MSCO over the top to make it the best. From that episode came the ideas that form the core of Your Management Sucks:

• Developing your own personal killer app—the “differentiator” that will make you more than the sum of your parts

• Unleashing your virtual Manhattan Project: the plan that will change your life, your business, and the world

• Challenging the oxymoron of conventional wisdom

• Applying C+A+M: The universal equation for perpetual growth

In the same straight-talking, no-BS style of his last book, Your Marketing Sucks, Stevens offers brass-tacks examples of management approaches that do—and don’t—work and inspires people to ask themselves the tough questions they need to answer in order to become true leaders.


Your Seven-Point Declaration of War on Management That Sucks

1. Unleash the Power of a Personal Philosophy: Don’t just rock the boat of your business, be prepared to capsize it.

2. Challenge the Oxymoron of Conventional Wisdom: The so-called smart thing is all too often stale thinking masquerading as truth.

3. Take a Good Look in the Mirror . . . Do You See a Leader? The worst damn thing in the world you can do is copy success. Be an original.

4. Develop Your Personal Killer App: Become greater than the sum of your parts.

5. Unleash Your Manhattan Project: Implement the plan that will change your world and your life.

6. Capture Ideas with a Butterfly Net: Seek out what you need to know and use it for personal growth.

7. Apply C+A+M, the Universal Equation for Perpetual Growth: Win customers and make them deliriously happy.



 

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